Ceci n’est pas un Blog

I always go to China during my “transition periods”: between Germany and Canada, middle school and high school, and high school and college. Therefore, all of my extended family back home expected me to go back this summer as I made my transition from an MIT undergrad to a Harvard grad student. But when my parents told me they would not be able to accompany me to my trip China this summer, I suddenly no longer wanted to go.

The reasons boiled down to language, culture, and time-related alienation from my extended family. This is actually quite difficult for me to admit, but I will bear the shame and try to elaborate on the origins of the estrangement from my family.

1. Language

I can count on one hand the Chinese friends with whom I speak on a regular basis. I speak English to all of them. When my parents call, they talk to me in Chinese and I respond in English. Sometimes I intersperse some Chinese words here and there, but hearing the way my words clumsily stumble over my tongue is like watching myself dog paddling through a pool of advanced swimmers. My cousins used to introduce me as “the foreigner” or the “American” to their friends when I visited them in China. I silently hated those words. Yet now, for the first time in my life, listening to my awkward and ugly Chinese has made me realize just how much of a foreigner I have become.

Sometimes when I am surrounded in a Chinese environment (ex. home), the muscles in my mouth grow accustomed to the language and the Chinese flows out with more ease. Nonetheless, the sporadic practice has worn my vocabulary thin and I struggle to communicate with my family (or even family friends) with pure Chinese. That’s the foremost reason I really depend on my parents being around if I go back to China: I need a translator.

2. Culture

You probably know by now that I am a complete nutjob. I curse like a sailor and I depend on crude sexual jokes, nerdy science humor, and references to internet memes to support conversations. None of that would fly in China. Plus, going back to the language problem, I don’t know how to say “quantum dots,” “photocatalytic water splitting with a metal oxide,” or “will be fucked in the ass by my Applied Physics quals” in Chinese. That, pretty much, leaves me with nothing to talk about.

3. Timing

Last time I was back in China for an impressionable time was before MIT. At that point, I was still a teenager, dating my ex, crying to mediocre singer-songwriters, and a virgin. A lot has changed since then (though sometimes, only sometimes, I still listen to bad acoustic guitar songs with emo lyrics that make little sense). Therefore, I don’t feel like my family doesn’t know me. The truth is, they probably don’t. They know me as well as I know them. Hell, I don’t even know most of their names. I call them Auntie or Uncle anyways. The large gaps between visits and the lack of communication during these intervals are probably the strongest sources of alienation for me.

Do I love my family? Undoubtably so. Do I miss my family? Quite honestly, maybe not so much. I have very fond memories of China, my childhood, and of course my family. They treat me much better than I deserve to be treated. I’m served the most expensive dishes and showered with unrelenting attention. “What do you want, Shanying? Tell me anything and we’ll buy it for you. Anything!” And they mean it. Thinking of my Chinese family elicits feelings of nostalgia, deep gratitude, and guilt. But not a sense of closeness.

Does this make me a cold and heartless person who turns her back on her loving family? Because that’s how I feel sometimes.

Comments, insights, and personal stories are always appreciated. Particularly on this issue.

I love my friends. Specifically, I love it when my friends compliment me on my cooking. Mike told me the meals I made this week were particularly delicious. And then Rodeo told me my meatballs were better than those from Rendez-vous, which is my favorite restaurant in Cambridge. Such flattery! I was soooooo happy.

I also made Ramen today, which I’ve been craving for weeks already. Everything was perfect…except the Spam that for some reason I thought would be good. It tasted like brain (and yes, I’ve had brain before). Never again!

“I would never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” - Woody Allen in Annie Hall

It’s pathetic how good I’ve gotten at making excuses for myself. I’ve been very disappointed with myself recently, but I have yet to do anything about it. Because, see, I may be the world’s most unmotivated person right now…but, don’t worry, that’s all temporary.

Really, I will start working hard again once I move into my the new apartment with my own desk/have a thesis to work towards/have an advisor who’s on my case.

…right.

I feel pangs of guilt every time I intentionally ignore the alarm clock in the mornings, when I fall asleep on the lab couch while “reading a paper,” and when I go home at 3pm. But there are no consequences to my actions. I’m not being graded on this, I won’t be fired, and I won’t get anything published from this anyways. Suddenly, there’s no point in any of this, aside from the fact that I need something to keep me occupied and I want to leave the Belcher lab on a positive note. I feel so jaded over all this research, I have no faith that anything I work on in the next few months will amount to anything.

You’d think recognizing that the problem lies in myself is the hardest part. Getting the lazy side I hate to succumb to my reasonable side is truly the obstacle here. These are days when I just can’t deal with myself.

We have a new apartment!!! Move in date is June 1st. I don’t think I can describe to you how excited I am about this. I can’t wait to have my own (newly renovated!) kitchen, a desk that’s not the giantic mess that Mike likes to work in, and the space to bring out all of my shoes. While Mike’s current room is probably one of the biggest dorm rooms on campus, it’s still quite cramped with our queen-sized bed and the extra drawer.

Most importantly, however, this apartment has windows. Giant windows! That face out into an actual space that’s not the shaft of a building! Furthermore, our room is east facing, which means I will wake up under the warmth of the sun.

You should be excited as well because having my own apartment means I can host more dinner parties. There shall definitely be house-warming dates set. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open!

Mom: Does your gay friend have a “partner”?
Me: Um…I don’t think so.
Mom: So he’s single.
Me: Yes.
Mom: Oh okay. He can become straight then.
Me: ….No.
Mom: Why not? What’s so great about staying gay?
Me: Are you serious? You don’t just decide one day to be a gay man for the hell of it, and then switch back to pussy* once you’re single again.
Mom: Don’t be silly. They can switch back to normal if they tried.
Me: [voice rising] You have–How can you just–oh jesus lord of saviors, forget it. This conversation is over.

Sometimes it hurts to talk to my parents. And yes, I use jesus’ name sarcastically and in vain. Bite me.

*did not use such crude phrasing. I have no shame on the internet, but I do have plenty of it in front of my parents.

Those who know me know that I’m a little confused when it comes to my origins. Am I Chinese, German, Canadian, or American? If you know me, you also know that I spend most of my life being anti-American and whining about the British system. Why would you choose to not use the system based off of multiples of 10? It makes so much mathematic and scientific sense.

But then I thought about this more carefully. If someone tells me it’s going to be 60 this weekend, I would have absolutely no idea what that means. I function only under Celsius. I would be equally clueless if you told me the average length of an erect penis is 10 inches (I pulled that out of my ass. The average length that is, not the penis. So don’t quote me on that value). However, I have a very clear concept of 3 miles vs. 26 miles. I can run 3 miles and I would die ten times over if I were running/walking/crawling 26 miles. Similarly, I couldn’t tell you how much I weighed in kg’s.

Therefore, for everyone’s convenience, I have made a list of which units I understand in your language:

Temperature
Fuck Fahrenheit. Seriously. Unless you’re talking about body temperature. I know that anything >100F is considered a fever.

Volume
I understand gallon (milk jug), half gallon (small milk jug), and cups/tbsp/tsp (yay for baking). Everything else, uL, mL, and L.

Length
My form of units: nm, mm, cm, m, miles, light years. Don’t even get my started on “yards” as a measure though.

*EDIT* Rodeo has to be a douche and correct me. Apparently the avg size is around 6 inches. Of course Rodeo would know. I’m sure every night Rodeo goes “please little guy? just a little more? pleeeeaaaasee?”

It could be just the fact that I’m at MIT, but I am noticing a significant increase in nerds in media. Consider TV shows such as The IT Crowd, The Big Bang Theory, Beauty and the Geek, and Numb3rs. These shows have, to everyone’s surprise, grown widely popular. We all love to laugh at the socially dysfunctional theoretical physicist or the painfully naïve tech guy. Are nerds and geeks the new trend? Perhaps everyone harbors a little nerd inside, creating a soft spot for those awkward characters who just don’t quite fit in.

Taking a step back, however, I would argue that the trend hasn’t necessarily moved towards nerds, geeks, and techies, but towards socially unfit characters in general. Consider TV shows such as The Office and Arrested Development and movies such as Superbad, Napoleon Dynamite, and The 40-year-old-Virgin. It appears that people are just not as interested in those beautiful and popular high school kids. As much as I wish everyone would laugh at my science-based sexual innuendos, I think it’s not that we’re all a little nerdy inside, but that we’re all, in some ways, cultural misfits. No one is as charismatic as they wish they were and there’s nothing better than embracing the relatable characters and having a good laugh over it.

What do you think? Has awkward become the new cool?

When someone calls me in a really noisy area and I can’t hear them or myself. Are we seriously supposed to be having a conversation? And “can’t find a quieter place” is not a legitimate excuse. There is always the outdoors.

I’ve taken on to drinking a glass of wine each night in bed. I like feeling the warmth slip down to my stomach. Normally I would be watching a few episodes of Desperate Housewives, the perfect brainless activity I’ve resorted to all week. But I was slightly offended by the portrayal of an obsequious and naïve Chinese immigrant/servant in a recent episode I saw and decided to make tonight an off-night. Tonight is reserved for a few peaceful hours with my glass of Pinot Noir and a few of Amy Hempel’s short stories.

Until now, I had avoided ordering or buying Pinot Noir after some self-proclaimed wine expert denounced it as the most sought-after wine since Sideways became a hit. Hollywood ruins everything. A few weeks ago, I stood cluelessly in the wine aisle of Trader Joe’s searching for an everyday table wine. I squatted down to better read the small handwritten notes on the types of wines. “Full-bodied, tannic, dark, lingering sweetness of strawberries…” It all sounded the same to me. It was time to turn to Hollywood and follow what’s “in.”

It turns out popular demand isn’t so bad after all. Pinot Noir is sensitive: silky yet heavy, sweet with a hint of bitterness, and very sensual and sexual, exuding aromas of sweaty French men working in the fields. Just kidding. I don’t know jack shit about wine. Fuck all that fancy talk. I enjoyed drinking it and it’s been curing me well of my insomnia.

Goal: accomplished. Good night, my loves.

I’ve made myself very visible on the web: blogs (many of them!), facebook, twitter, personal website, linked in, picasa web albums, myspace, etc. Especially since my name isn’t a common name, it has become very easy to find out my contact info and all of my struggles and secret thoughts since freshman year of high school. While this might freak some people out, it honestly hasn’t phased me all that much. I’ve always been pretty transparent and open. I generally don’t have anything online that I wouldn’t tell you in real life. As a matter of fact, there is very little (if anything at all) about me that I would hide. Privacy just doesn’t mean that much to me, I suppose.

(For example, at home I walk around naked and pee with the door open. I would do it now, if it wasn’t for the fact I live on an all-male floor of a dorm.)

Recently however, I’ve started wondering if this is something I should be more careful about. Most people out there seemed to be a lot more concerned about their visibility on the internet. I have friends who keep their tweet in private. Some who blog avoid more personal topics. Others untag every picture of them on facebook and limit their profile to only the bare minimum.

So, dear readers, I ask again for you to enlighten me with your wisdoms. How visible are you on the web? Does it bother you and why or why not? How you hold back your identity? Should I be more worried about my privacy?